the singularity of being and nothingness
Cool Stuff
The Brutal Four Year-Old, Part Deux
Aug 29th
If you’ve ever played basketball, football, or extreme frisbee with me, you’ll know that exercise produces certain epidermic transformations in me…namely, beet-red skin. I’ve always had this malady, whether in shape or not.
Tonight, I finished up Kenpo X as part of my P90X routine. I’m only the second week into it, but I felt really, really good about this workout. I finished all the reps and made conscious efforts to push myself when I felt myself letting up. I was feeling pretty confident, and as I toweled off my face my daughter walked into the living room. Noticing my painfully red face, she looked at me and said in a joking, mocking tone:
“Daddy, why is your face all red?
“Well, honey, I just got done with a really strenuous workout,” I replied.
Holding back a laugh, she blurted out, “No, you’re just doing it all wrong!”
Share this: Brutal Fashion Advice From a Four Year-old
Aug 29th
While I was shaving this morning, my daughter noticed the faux weathering on the “New York” lettering on my shirt. As most four year-olds are prone to do, she launched into a litany of questions about this seemingly strange sight. I did my best to explain the process that the lettering went through to wind up looking as it does, for which I was rewarded with several blank and bored stares. After patiently waiting for my explanation to conclude, my daughter followed-up with an eminently reasonable question:
“Daddy, why did they do that?”
“I guess they did it so that it would look cool, honey,” I replied.
She pondered this for a moment, and finally settled on her final evaluation:
“Daddy, it doesn’t look cool at all…”
Share this: Heading Home
Aug 18th
Over the last several days, my family and I have been in Watertown, South Dakota visiting my grandparents. We’ve had a wonderful time, and are hitting the road today to make the trek back to Cincinnati.
Watertown is a pretty interesting place. Although it’s population is only 20,000 or so, there is a TON of stuff to do in the area. From the beautiful Terry Redlin art gallery, to several surrounding lakes, to a large and vibrant downtown, it’s like a mini-metropolis in the middle of mostly nowhere.
My family and I had a great time, and will definitely remember this trip for many years to come!
Share this: A New Blog About Yummy Stuff :)
Aug 11th
My sister-in-law has recently launched a new blog about food, which is awesome, because I just so happen to love to eat food.
The blog is called The Fresh Fridge, and covers lots of ground, from 20-minute meals, to appetizers, to wine reviews.
If you’re hungry, or have already eaten and are already looking for some inspiration for your next meal, check it out 🙂
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ColdFusion Query Parameter Weirdness
Aug 3rd
You can file this one under either “huh, that’s kinda cool” or “that’s terrible…don’t ever do it!”…or maybe both.
As of ColdFusion 9, it’s now possible to execute queries in 100% cfscript. This is awesome for me ‘cuz I just happen to prefer to do as much in cfscript as possible.
Anyway, if you’ve worked with the cfscript version of cfquery, you’ll know that mimicking the behavior of cfqueryparam is pretty straightforward. Something like the following should do the trick:
// create new query services
qs = new query();
// set attributes of service
qs.addattributes(datasource="mydb",name="thequery");
// set sql
qs.setsql("select title from posts where isawesome = ?);
// set queryparam for dynamic query
qs.addparam(value="Awesome",cfsqltype="varchar");
...rest of processing...
Easy enough. I got to wondering if it would be possible to use a ternary operator as the “value” of the queryparam. Turns out, you can 🙂
// set queryparam for dynamic query using ternary operator
qs.addparam(value=form.isawesome==true ? 'Awesome' : '',cfsqltype="varchar");
Here, if a form variable (“isawesome”) is set to true, the value of the parameter will be “Awesome”; otherwise, it will be set to empty string.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On a certain level, it’s cool that it works. However, it feels kind of hacky to More >
Ext JS is Now Sencha
Jun 16th
This caught me a little by surprise. A few days ago, Ext JS–a pretty awesome JavaScript framework–announced that it is joining forces with jQTouch and Raphaël to form a new company named Sencha. Branding, domain–everything is changing.
Personally, I really like this move. To me, it shows that Ext JS is interested in expanding in very important directions–vector graphic JS manipulation and mobile content–by teaming up with jQTouch and Raphaël. I’ve used Raphaël in the past for some pretty cool and simple effects, but have yet to really play around much with jQTouch (although it looks pretty sweet). Anyway, I am definitely looking forward to what’s ahead for this already great framework..the future looks very bright 🙂
Interested in learning more? Check out Sencha’s official blog post about the merger.
Share this: Migrating a Custom Blog (or blogs…) to WordPress
Jun 11th
When I first got into web development, one of my first projects was to create a custom blog for myself. Apart from the sheer necessity of needing a blog at the time, I embarked on this coding journey because I had read somewhere that developing a blog would provide a good introduction to the nitty-gritty of application design.
While this wasn’t 100% accurate, it also was not terrifically far from the truth. Through many struggles and achievements, I finally wound up with my own custom blog, complete with commenting system, RSS delivery, and eventually automatic posting to Twitter.
This modest blog served me pretty well for a few months, but I quickly outgrew it. I found myself pouring precious hours into little development projects to try to get it to do cool stuff that I came across in other, more robust systems.
Eventually, however, I ran out of time and motivation. First, the continual development stopped. Then, out of total laziness, important things like bug fixes and comment-security fell to the wayside. While I still loved to blog, the sheer effort of posting (my interface was a bit clunky…) was a big hindrance, so the posts became quite sparse.
Then I got my iPhone. More >
Monty Hall Problem…in ColdFusion
Jun 6th
If you saw my post about the Monty Hall Problem, you know that calculating the probabilities in this puzzle, while not terrifically complicated, are nonetheless a bit frustrating to our feelings of common sense. Therefore, I decided to whip up a quick script that would simulate the Monty Hall problem in code.
It turns out that this has been done many times before, and if you head on over to rosettacode.org, you can find scripts for nearly every language you could imagine…except ColdFusion.
Thinking this to be an incredible travesty, I have produced a CF version of the problem, and have posted it over at rosettacode.org.
If you’re too lazy to click a link, however, here is the script in its entirety:
<cfscript>
function runmontyhall(num_tests) {
// number of wins when player switches after original selection
switch_wins = 0;
// number of wins when players "sticks" with original selection
stick_wins = 0;
// run all the tests
for(i=1;i<=num_tests;i++) {
// unconditioned potential for selection of each door
doors = [0,0,0];
// winning door is randomly assigned...
winner = randrange(1,3);
// ...and actualized in the array of real doors
doors[winner] = 1;
// player chooses one of three doors
choice = randrange(1,3);
do {
// More > 
